Pop-Up Ads Begin To Face Serious Opposition

guttentag writes "The New York Times is running an article that looks at the ways AOL is trying to reinvent itself. Apparently, as customers began terminating their accounts and revenue dropped, AOL tried to make up the lost revenue by increasing the frequency of its popup ads. But the level of consumer satisfaction just seemed to plummet, so AOL's president formed a task force to study the problem. It found that focus group satisfaction went up "notably" when the number of popups was cut in half. As a result, AOL has scaled back (but not eliminated) the popups and it says this has been a catalyst for revolution within the company." Combine this with the recent announcement from iVillage and who knows - maybe more content providers will see the light - the light that readers don't like to be forcibly diverted from what they are doing.

Comments

Popup Ads Don't Bother Me At All

[FreeUser]

Popup ads do not bother me at all.

Why? Because I use mozilla exclusively, and have turned off javascript's ability to

• open unrequested windows
• move or resize existing windows
• raise or lower windows
• hide the status bar

Any site I hit that says something asinine like "best viewed with Internet Explorer gets an email from me explaining why I will never bother to use their site, and (in the vast majority of cases, where I find a competitor that does adhere to standards), why I have gone to their competitor instead despite having found their page first.

I keep a template of the email handy, so that only a few seconds are required to make the complaint to both the webmaster AND two others who are as high up in the firm as I can discover in a quick web search.

These sites are few and far between ... mozilla works for the vast, vast majority of sites I visit, use, and make purchases from, but for those few who don't the one or two minutes required to fire off a polite, accurate, and pointed complaint is well worth it ... no one likes losing business, least of all smaller firms trying to get started and unwittingly losing 10-30% of their market (depending on whom you ask) because of Microsoft's deliberate incompatability games. Indeed, the number of heartfelt thank you's (and subsequently fixed sites, many of which have switched to some version of apache) I've received has been a very pleasant surprise.

In any event, there is absolutely no reason for one's web browsing experience to be the kind of popup hell described here ... a small modicum of knowledge and willingness to stand out from the herd is all that is required.

Get Proxomitron

[Arcturax]

Get Proxomitron
!

The setup is a it geeky, but it will remove almost all ads and popups and such crap. It also has many other powerful features and you can easilly add things to the blocklist. Since it runs as a proxy, you can point other machines on your network to it and it will filter them as well, great if being used in a buisiness to save on bandwidth costs, or to simplify home setup if you have a network with several machines in the house.

Best of all, its totally free!

Re:Mozilla popup suppression

[DennyK]

Last I heard, Netscape 6/7 does not have the "Open unrequested windows" option in the GUI. It is still in the browser, however, and can be enabled by using the following line in your prefs.js file:

user_pref("dom.disable_open_during_load", true);

DennyK

Re:Killing pop-up ads is a bad thing

[flacco]

Just as soon as Mozilla allows for me to block Flash ads in the same fashion I'll truely be happy.

A thousand times yes. I disabled flash, by moving the plugin file, and just re-enable it if I need it by copying back into the plugins directory. Big hassle, but not as bad as the motion sickness you get from gratuitous, over-down, endlessly looping flash animations.

Re:Killing pop-up ads is a bad thing

[Indras]

If you're using Linux, it would be incredibly easy to write a couple bash shells that could do this, then just add two icons on your KDE/Gnome desktop, one saying "Enable Flash" the other "Disable Flash." This would be a very convenient way to do what you're asking. Here's an example of what "Disable Flash" would look like:

#!/bin/bash (or insert your favorite shell here)
# Script to remove flash capability of Mozilla
# !MozPath = path to Mozilla Plugins directory
mv /!MozPath/filename /usr/src/

It would also work to just rename the file to something new... like adding a period "." to the front of the filename, to make it a hidden file.

Batch files would have the equivalent function in Windows:

Disable.bat
move x:\Path\filename x:\NewPath

Then, just create a shortcut to the batch file on your desktop, and you have the same functionality. The "Enable Flash" batch/shell script would be nearly identical, except with the parameters reversed on the move function.